The Labyrinth and the Green Man

Marius Paul O'Shea

The Labyrinth and the Green Man, or foliate head, are two recurrent
archetypal images, which, while teasingly ambiguous as to their
individual meanings, seem to share a common theme of death,
metamorphosis and rebirth. However, despite this commonality of
theme and their tendency to occur at many similar times and
locations, as subjects, they are, notwithstanding detailed scrutiny in
their respective literatures, rarely, if ever, linked. This article
examines one occasion from the distant past, namely, the myth of
'Theseus and the Minotaur', when the separate trajectories of the
Labyrinth and the Green Man intersected in the same narrative
space, thus establishing the beginnings of a thread which continues
to link them through to our own time.
Joseph Campbell recounts a story of his being at a talk by Daisetz
Suzuki at the Eranos Foundation in Ascona, Switzerland. Campbell
recalls:
here was this group of Europeans in the audience and there was
a Japanese man (he was about ninety-one years old at the time),
a Zen philosopher. He stood with his hands on his side, and he
looked at the audience and said, 'Nature against God. God
against nature. Nature against man. Man against nature. Man
against God. God against man. Very funny religion'.1
The wise Dr Suzuki pithily summed up a great many of Western
religion's attitudes to Nature; something to be beaten into
submission and put to work with the permission of a grumpy male
god. But as the rivers die, the trees bum or fall under the axe and
rising salt poisons the soil, other beliefs, other deities, once powerful
but long exiled to the periphery, begin to emerge once more: the
Great Mother and the Vegetation God have returned.
When I enter the phrases 'The Green Man' and 'The
Labyrinth' into the Google search engine, I get about 21,500 and
142,000 hits respectively. When I enter 'Green Man + Labyrinth', I

1 Phil Cousineau (ed), The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work,
Harper & Row (San Francisco, 1990) p172.

The Labyrinth and the Green Man

get 57, 500 responses. l Even with duplication, these numbers give a
pretty impressive indication of the continuing power of these two
archetypal images to create resonances in the contemporary psyche.
The epithet of 'The Green Man' bestowed on the vegetation god in
1939 by Lady Raglan,2 while giving him a popular brand name, has
possibly also done him a disservice by making him quaintly
Rackhamian and whimsical. For in having accessed a fair number of
the above-mentioned internet sites during my research, it seems to
me that, apart from a core of excellence, there is a danger that, in
certain areas of the New Age mind, the Green Man seems to have
settled down and become almost avuncular;' a sort of greenwood
Ronald McDonald (though considerably more prepossessing). In
too many ways the Green Man has become an object of piquant
nostalgia, gazing out of numerous virtual catalogues as a pendant,
wall or garden ornament on a par with all the other spiritual
bricolage; or else gainfully employed as a logo for ecologicallyminded puQlishers.
The labyrinth too is in danger of becoming a sort of spiritual
tranquilliser. As Virginia Westbury puts it:
[w]hat is its [the labyrinth's] purpose? Today, it is walked
mainly for n:teditation and a sense of inner peace... it is being
seen mainly as a tool for peace and guidance in a world which
appears to have little to offer in these departments. Its allure
may be simply that its one-track path implies that there is a way
through the wilderness of our stress-filled lives. It offers us the
hope of order in a disordered world, perhaps.3
All admirable sentiments, but we may have mistaken why the
Labyrinth and the Vegetation God have returned: they are chthonic
beings from a time when self-consciousness did not exist; when
stone, plant, animal and human were one, when the gods spoke and
people obeyed. They may be here to comfort us but perhaps, even
more so, they are here to warn us.
The vast majority of us live an urban existence where our bodily
needs are taken care of by a host of agencies, especially if we have
more than enough money. Most of us do not directly depend on
nature anymore, nor have done for a long time and tend to view it
1 As at 30/8/2002.

Lady Raglan, 'The Green Man in Church Architecture', Folklore 50 (1), pp45-57.
3 Virginia Westbury, Labyrinths: Ancient Paths of Wisdom and Peace, Lansdowne
Publishing Pty Ltd (Sydney, 2000) p8.
2

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as our playground, unless we are reminded of its power by a

cyclone, drought or bushfire. Our relationship to nature and its
archetypes is one of nostalgic affection. Just as paintings of the
landscape became more popular the more people were removed
from fundamental involvement with it, so we have produced garden
varieties of the Labyrinth and the Green Man who are essentially
warm and beneficent, all Apollonian light and user-friendliness.
Or at least, so we would have it. But now that we have developed
our technology to such a degree of savage sophistication that we are
well on the way to realizing our pathological obsession with
destroying the environment that ultimately sustains us, we would do
well to think of the other, darker side of the myths that have
nurtured these two images. For, as Rachel Pollack has put it,
[t]he vividness of Greek myth derives partly from its
conjunction of clear and lucid thought - exemplified in the
and wild violence,
elegant columns of Greek temples
including murder, cannibalism, incest, rape, mutilation, and
dismemberment. 1
Pollack goes on to surmise that
[t]hrough it all runs a sense of deeper layers, of other stories
and meanings, disguised and twisted, some elements brought
together, others tom apart, so that as you read the myths, you
can almost grasp a similar truth - but not quite. It is almost as
if a particularly neurotic genius has shaped these stories, filling
them with their own brilliance, and their own overwhelming
anxiety.2
She ascribes this neurotic quality to an anxiety induced in the
Mycenaean and later, the Dorian Greeks, by their overthrowing of
the religion of the Goddess, a religion they 'recognized as older,
and more deeply wedded to the land and to the natural facts of
existence, than that of their brutal warrior Gods' .3
According to Julian Jaynes, to understand a thing is to arrive at a
metaphor for it by substituting something more familiar to us;

1 Rachel Pollack, The Body of The Goddess: Sacred wisdom in Myth, Landscape and
Culture, Element Books Ltd, (Shaftesbury, 1997) p141.
2 Lac cif.
3 Lac cif.

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hence the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding. 1

Joseph Campbell has described God as a metaphor for a mystery
that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought, even the
categories of being and nonbeing. 2 The Labyrinth and the Green
Man are also metaphors, humbler yet, simply fingers pointing the
way to the heart of the mysteries; powerful instruments for dealing
with those categories of being and nonbeing, life, death, and
regeneration.
This is, I feel, why the myth of 'Theseus and the Minotaur'
attains such significance, for it is in this particular myth that the
separate trajectories of the Labyrinth and the Green Man, and all
that they connote, come together for (perhaps) the first time, thus
establishing a thread which continues to link them through to the
present day.

Theseus and the Minotaur

Zeus, in the form of a bull had carried Europa, daughter of the
Phoenician ruler Agenor, off to Crete. Asterius ('the starry one'),
King of Crete, married Europa, after Zeus had abandoned her, and
adopted her semi-divine sons, Minos, Rhadamanthys and Sarpedon.
After Asterius's death, Minas claimed the Cretan throne and, in
proof of his right to reign, boasted that the gods would answer
whatever prayer he offered them. First dedicating an altar to
Poseidon, and, having made all the preparations for a sacrifice, he
then prayed that a sacrificial bull might emerge from the sea. At
once, a dazzlingly white bull swam ashore, but Minos was so struck
by its beauty that he sent it to join his own herds, and slaughtered
another instead. Awestruck by the appearance of the bull, all Crete
accepted Minos's claim to the throne.
Minas then married the voluptuous Pasiphae, a daughter of
Helius and the nymph Crete (Perseis), who bore him four daughters,
Ariadne, Phaedra, Akakallis, Xenodike, and four sons, Glaukos,
Katreus, Deukalion and Androgeos.
Poseidon was furious at Minas' ingratitude and swore to take
revenge by taking possession of what the king held most dear:
incarnating himself in the form of a bull he cast such a powerful
charm on Pasiphae that, utterly besotted, she decided to give herself
to the animal. At that time, there was in the service of the king, a
1 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, Penguin Books (Harmondsworth, 1976) p52.
2 Cousineau, op cit, p36.

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brilliant but secretive Greek craftsman named Daedalus, the inventor

of the carpenter's square, who had fled from Athens after murdering
his brilliant student and nephew, Talos. Daedalus claimed that Talos
had stolen his inventions of the compass and the saw. Daedalus
designed a leather cow within which the queen could secrete herself
in order to be pleasured by the disguised Poseidon. From this union
was born the monstrous Minotaur, a creature with a human body
and bull's head. Ashamed of both his wife's transgression and his
own apostasy, Minos had this same Daedalus design a hidden prison
for the Minotaur, modelled on the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh
Lamares (Amenemhet Ill), so complex that neither the monster nor
anyone else who entered it could escape.
But Poseidon was not finished with Minos. The white bull, which
had been his gift to Minos, rampaged about the Cretan countryside,
destroying crops and killing people until captured by Herakles, who
took it back to Greece and released it on the plain of Argos. Driven
from there across the Isthmus to Marathon, it continued its
murderous ways, killing hundreds, including Minas's son,
Androgeos, until captured by Theseus, who dragged the bull in
triumph through the streets of Athens, and up the steep slopes of the
Acropolis, where he sacrificed it to Athene, or to Apollo. Athens
was, at that time, a tributary city of Crete, so, in reprisal, Minas
demanded that Aegeus, king of Athens, pay a tribute of seven
youths and seven maidens every nine years. These young men and
men were then sent into the labyrinth as sacrificial victims to be torn
apart and eaten by the Minotaur.
The time for the third tribute was drawing near. Theseus, the
illegitimate son of Aegeus (or Poseidon who had lain with Aethra,
the mother of Theseus, the same night as had Aegeus) had recently
come to Athens to be reunited with his putative earthly father. He
volunteered to become one of the seven youths so that he could
attempt to kill the monster. As Theseus left, he 'promised Aegeus
that if he were successful he would hoist a white sail on his safe
return in contrast to the mournful black sails of the two previous
returning tribute-ships.
After arriving in Crete, Theseus seduced Ariadne, his cousin,
who, to help her lover, disclosed secrets she had learned from
Daedalus. She supplied Theseus with a sword and magical thread
that would guide him out through the winding corridors. Laying
down Ariadne's thread to mark his passage, Theseus found the
Minotaur, his half-brother, asleep, and slew him. So as to avoid the
wrath of Minas, he quickly gathered together the other youths and
maidens, as well as Ariadne, and sailed from Crete.
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Breaking the journey back to Athens on the island of Dia, now

known as Naxos, Theseus abandoned Ariadne. Some say that he
deserted her in favour of a new mistress, Aegle, daughter of
Panopeus; others that, while wind-bound on Dia, he reflected on the
scandal that Ariadne's arrival would cause upon their return to
Athens. Others again, that Dionysus, appearing to Theseus in a
dream, threateningly demanded Ariadne for himself, and that, when
Theseus awoke to see Dionysus's fleet bearing down on Dia, he
weighed anchor in sudden terror; Dionysus having cast a spell
which made him forget his promise to Ariadne and even her very
existence. Ariadne was succoured by the god Dionysos who quickly
married her. Arriving on the island of Delos, Theseus celebrated his
victory by performing a dance inspired by his conquest of the
labyrinth, 'at once a tracing of a path, a procession, and a trance',
called the geranos, or 'crane-dance'. Graves, citing Plutarch,
Callimachus and Homer, describes how
Theseus and his companions danced the Crane, which consists
of labyrinthine [involutions and] evolutions, trod with measured
steps to the accompaniment of harps. The Delians still perform
this dance, which Theseus introduced form Knossos; Daedalus
had built Ariadne a dancing-floor there, marked with a maze
pattern in white marble relief, copied from the Egyptian
labyrinth. When Theseus and his companions performed the
Crane at Delos, this was the first occasion on which men and
women danced together. Old-fashioned people, especially
sailors, keep up much the same dance in many different cities of
Greece and Asia Minor; so do children in the Italian
countryside, and it is the foundation of the Troy Game. 1
Hampered by contrary winds, Theseus did not reach sight of the
Attic coast until the eighth day of Pyanepsion (October). For
whatever reason, he had forgotten to hoist the victorious white sail,
and Aegeus seeing the black one, was overcome by grief and fell to
his death in the sea which now bears his name.
Theseus did not discover Aegeus' death until after he had
completed the sacrifices vowed to the gods for his safe return; he
then buried Aegeus, honouring him with a hero-shrine. 2 Having
returned at harvest time, Theseus also instituted the Festival of Grape
1 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: Vol.I, Penguin Books (Harmondsworth, 1955
[1979]) p342.
2 Ibid, p343

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Boughs, either in gratitude to Dionysos and Athene - both of whom
had appeared to him on Naxos - or to Dionysos and Ariadne.
The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur has continued to
fascinate ever since because it has all the ingredients of a bestseller:
deceit and intrigue, murder, cannibalism, rape, mutilation, not to
mention unnatural sexual practices with animals! It also has, very
strongly, that sense of deeper layers, of stories and meanings
disguised and twisted which give it an enigmatic, puzzling quality.
Underneath the thick carpet of much later Athenian political
propaganda about assertive independence, decisive leadership, and
the supremacy of male gods, there can be. detected some very bulky
forms of other more complex realities such as the worship of the
Great Goddess and the cycle of life, death and regeneration, of
which the Green Man (Dionysos) and the labyrinth are both
symbols and actors.
On the surface, Theseus' abandonment of Ariadne is strange;
equally strange is the sudden deus ex machina appearance of
Dionysos and his scooping up of the abandoned heroine to a life of
wedded bliss. However, if the focus of the Theseus myth is shifted
from its eponymous hero to the worship of the Great Goddess (the
matrifocal religion that first appears in the Neolithic period), then
the situation becomes clearer and a different story begins to
emerge. According to Robert Graves,
[t]he Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and
omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been
introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for
pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared,
adored and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she attended
in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and
motherhood their prime mystery. 1
The Great Goddess was One, but was seen as Three: the goddesses
of the upper air (the moon who controlled the sun); the earth; and
the underworld. Upon examination, all the female figures of the
Theseus myth (Europa, Perseis, Pasiphae, Ariadne) are aspects of the
Moon Goddess. 2 William Anderson draws upon Marija Gimbutas'
description of 'the ithyphallic masked god', who is son, lover and

1 /bid, pI3.
2/bid, p14.

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guardian of the Great Goddess, often portrayed in sculptures

wearing a bull mask with homs. l
Both Zeus and Dionysos (as Zagreus) may have originated in
Crete as vegetationlbull-gods, escorts to the Great Goddess who
would have ritually coupled with her in her aspect as the Moon
Cow. Originally, the Great Goddess' human (and, significantly,
male) escort - embodying ZeuslDionysos - would have been killed
at the waning of the year so as to ensure the fertility of the
following year's crops, and resurrected in the person of a new
escort in the following spring. By the middle of the second
millennium, the time of Minas (the dynastic name of the leader of
the Hellenised aristocracy which had taken over in Crete some
decades before2) a compromise between the religion of the Great
Goddess and the newcomers' male theocracy had obviously been
reached. It would seem that the practice of annually sacrificing the
Great Goddess' consort had ceased and instead a tanist died in his
place every Great Year; that is, the eight-year period (by Greek
calculation) after which the solar and lunar calendars became
aligned, thereby reuniting the sun with the moon. 3 This tanist, a
youth who ruled for one day, may have been the Minotaur
(JlIVOV Tavpos, minou taros, literally: 'the bull of Minas'). The
seven youths and seven maidens sent from Athens would probably
not have been human sacrifices but hostages from powerful families
to ensure the good conduct of Athens as a vassal state, although
Hermann Kern ascribes their status as victims for the Minotaur to
their possible forcible use as bull-Ieapers which 'surely often
resulted in death'.4
The description of the labyrinth as a complex underground
structure at the heart of which lived the Minotaur was a later
confusion between the sprawling multileveled building at Knossos part palace, part religious compound - and the configuration
known to us as the Cretan, or Classical, labyrinth which was a level,
marked area for sacred dances, somewhat similar to the description

1 William Anderson, The Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth,
Compass Books (Fakenham,1998) p34 citing Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses
and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images (London and New
York, 1982 [new edition used]) p220.
2 Graves, op cit, p345.
3 Hermann Kern, Through the Labyrinth: Designs and Meanings over 5,000 Years,
Prestel Publications (Munich, 2000) p46.
4 Loc cit.

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in Homer of the chorDs depicted on the shield Hephaestus

fashioned for Achilles:
Therein, furthermore the god of the two strong arms cunningly
wrought a dancing-floor like unto that which in wide Cnossus
Daedalus fashioned of old for fair-tressed Ariadne. There were
youths dancing and maidens of the price of many cattle,
holding their hands upon the wrists one of the other.... Now
would they run round with cunning feet exceeding lightly, as
when a potter sitteth by his wheel that is fitted between his hands
and maketh trial of whether it will run; and now again would
they run in rows toward each other. And a great company stood
around the lovely dance, taking joy therein; and two tumblers
whirled up and down through the midst of them as leaders of
the dance. 1
This corresponds to the description given by Plutarch of the
Geranos, or 'crane-dance' choreographed by Theseus on Delos as
consisting in certain measured turnings and retumings, imitative of
the windings and twistings of the labyrinth. 2 The third century BeE
Greek poet Callimachus of Cyrene mentions that the Delian dance
was performed at night by torchlight, necessitating a rope ('the
thread of Ariadne') to link the dancers. 3 It is not possible to say
definitively what the meaning or significance of this dance was, but
in the context of the Theseus myth it could possibly have been a
fertility ritual to do with the marriage of the Sun Bull (Minas) and
the Moon-Cow (Pasiphae). Pollack suggests that spiral imagery may
track the patterns of the Sun and Moon: the rising and setting of the
sun implies a circle, with the bottom half invisible below the
horizon, but this circle gets bigger or smaller with the change in the
sun's position each day.4 Moving from the winter to summer
solstice, the circle begins at a wider point each day, so that the
apparent motion of the sun forms a clockwise spiral when facing
south, the direction of the sun. The moon's path, even though it
rises in the east and sets in the west, through the lunar month forms
a spiral whose successive loops cross the ecliptic in a westward, anticlockwise motion opposed to the direction of the sun and planets.
Hence, the Cretan labyrinth, with its seven circuits and central area,
1 Iliad

18.590-606 as cited in Ibid, p44.

2 Ibid, p45; see also Graves, op cit, p342.

3 Hymn to Delos 300-315 cited in Kern, op cit, p45
4 Pollack, op cit pp96-7; see also Kern, op cit p46.

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unites not only the opposing paths of the sun and moon but also the
number of years of a Great Year.
A possibility that suggests itself is that the Moon Cow-masked
Queen and the Sun Bull-masked King made a symbolic progress
through a Great Year and then coupled in the central area, the
womb of the Great Goddess, in celebration of their Sacred Marriage
and signifying the next phase of Minos' reign. The scene can be
imagined as taking place at night by torchlight: a line of dancers,
female and male, moving somewhat in the way of modem Greek
folkdances, singing sacred hymns and leading the masked figures
of Pasiphae and Minos through the serpentine convolutions of the
labyrinth until they reach the centre. Here, they leave the Moon
Cow and Sun Bull to ritually couple while they, still chanting,
retread the labyrinth.
Kern suggests that in a myth replete with examples of initiation,
the labyrinth is the perfect embodiment of initiation rites l since, as
he puts it,
[i]nitiation signifies symbolic death and rebirth. Yet physical
death can also be seen as the transformation of a former
existence and as a passage to a new one. Accordingly, the
labyrinth's path also represents the path to the underworld, the
return to Mother Earth being associated with the promise of
reincarnation. The path into the labyrinth represents the path to
the bowels of the earth, the viscera terrae. I consider this to be
one of the channels through which ideas deriving from cave
cults could have been conveyed and transformed into the
labyrinth concept. 2

Dionysos
lames Frazer postulates that Dionysos, both as a goat and a bull, was
'essentially a god of vegetation'.3 Besides being closely identified
with the vine, almost all the Greeks sacrificed to 'Dionysus of the
Tree', and in Boeotia one of his titles was 'Dionysus in the tree'.
His image was often merely an upright post, without arms, but
draped in a mantle, with a bearded mask to represent the head,
1 Kern, op cit p47.
2lbid, p31.
3 James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Macmillan Press (London and Toronto, 1967
reprint used), p615.

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and with leafy boughs projecting from the head or body to

show the nature of the deity. 1
Given the wide-ranging travels of his followers, the Maenads, this
would imply that the image of the god needed no temple but could
be easily set up in a grove wherever they came to rest.
Like other gods of vegetation, such as Osiris, Artemis, or Attis,
Dionysos was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been
brought back to life again. His followers, in their ecstasy, tore
animals and even people to pieces and devoured them. 2 Believed
for a long time to have been a latecomer to the Greek pantheon
from Thrace (The Iliad hardly mentions him and then only
slightingly), or even further afield (he bears resemblances to Shiva),
this Dionysos is now thought possibly to be a late manifestation of a
revival of Goddess worship. That Dionysos is also a much older
deity is attested by the appearance of his name on a thirteenth
century BeE clay tablet in Cretan Linear B script found in Pylos,
and, incidentally, wine is thought to have been introduced to Greece
from Crete. 3

Growth, Decay and Regrowth

Dionysos (originally a Thracian beer-god, Sabazius) is strongly
attached to the DemeterlPersephone myths. Demeter is the grain
goddess; her daughter Persephone, the goddess of renewed growth.
In one story of his origins (as Cretan Zagreus) Dionysos' mother is
Persephone, raped by Zeus in the form of a great serpent. Dionysus
was born homed, his hair wreathed with snakes. Dionysos also plays
an integral part in the Eleusinian mysteries as Iacchos! It was
through the popularity of the Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries
as they spread throughout the later Roman Empire that his image
became grafted on to the tree worship of Gaul and northern Europe,
then syncretised into Christian iconography in the Dark Ages.
The labyrinth was also carried throughout the Empire and again
syncretised, appearing on the floors of Christian churches from late
antiquity onwards. Medieval pilgrims, on their journey from Paris to
Santiago de Compostela, crossing the great, horizontal expanse of
La Beauce, would behold the looming vertical magnificence of
Chartres cathedral soaring up from the flatness of the surrounding
1 lbid, pp509-10
2 This is, of course, most famously recounted in Euripides' Bacchae.
3 Graves, op cit pI 09.

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plains. Approaching the richly carved west end of the cathedral,

they would see a huge rose window, which, when they entered the
building, would reveal its full stained glass magnificence.
Remarkably, they would also see covering the floor of the nave
between the third and sixth bays, a strange, circular stonework of the
exact dimensions of the rose window, glowing high above them on
the western wall. The outer perimeter of this circle is scalloped with
one hundred and thirteen lunations, engraved with the verses of the
Miserere. Inside the circle are coiled eleven elongated, concentric
loops, a unicursal path demarcated by a band of black stone,
contrasting with the brown quarry-stone of the cathedral floor. The
pilgrims would follow this path in prayer, the most devout on their
knees, recapitulating the straight and narrow path of mankind to
Paradise, or the pilgrim to inaccessible Jerusalem. As the pilgrim
reaches the fifth loop, just next to the centre, the path winds away
again, changing direction six times and making three hundred and
seventy hairpin turns, so that the pilgrim walks a total distance
precisely ten times the height of the nave before reaching the centre,
which is shaped like a six-petalled rosette, an exact replica of the
shape of the rose window. At the centre of the rosette is a copper
plaque engraved with the images of Theseus, Ariadne and the
Minotaur, symbolising Jesus liberating the human soul from the
grip of the Devil.
The pilgrim present in the cathedral at the summer solstice will,
moreover, see the image of the rose window fall exactly on the floor
pattern, itself located precisely halfway between the summit of the
cathedral vault and the underground river running beneath it,
turning the whole building into a cosmic omphalos. 1
It would appear significant that the vegetation god should
appear in such large numbers (seventy in Chartres cathedral alone)
inside as well as outside the churches and in such close proximity to
labyrinths when the veneration of the Virgin Mary was at its height
in the Middle Ages, thus renewing the ancient relationship between
the Queen of the Heavens - the God Mother - and the genius of
growth and continuance.
After the Reformation, the labyrinth and the Green Man were
banished from churches but continued to thrive on the wilder shores
of northern Europe and in various guises in folk tales and fairy
stories. Paradoxically, they made a reappearance with the revival of
Classicism in the Age of Enlightenment, finally beginning to
1 Jacques Attali, The Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom, North
Atlantic Books (Berkeley, 1998) plO.

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reassert themselves with increasing strength in the atmosphere of

polite paganism and growing ecological awareness of the latter
twentieth century.
The moral of the tale seems to be that the Great Goddess and
her consort are not only immortal but also irrepressible. Even if we
manage to choke the world and ourselves in our own pollution, so
long as the sun and moon still rise and a few hardy plants still
struggle for existence, the labyrinth will turn and the Green Man
will live again. We, on the other hand, may not. We have been
warned.

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